Scot McKnight asked Rob Merola to review Jaron Lanier's, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, on Jesus Creed: Jesus & Faith in the 21st Century.
The basic question Lanier's book addresses is, "What does it mean to be human?"
"You have to be somebody before you can share yourself." Jaron Lanier
McKnight asks,
"What are you doing about this issue?
Are you seeing people limiting connectivity or even walking away from it?"
Excerpts from the review:
" . . . the digital world and it its representations of persons threatens to diminish, reduce, and flatten us. And because we increasingly interact with each other through digital mediums instead of face to face, our relationship also are diminished, reduced, and impoverished. The individual is replaced with the hive. A unique point of view is obscured in a mash up. A distinct voice is lost in the computational cloud.
" . . . the digital world and it its representations of persons threatens to diminish, reduce, and flatten us. And because we increasingly interact with each other through digital mediums instead of face to face, our relationship also are diminished, reduced, and impoverished. The individual is replaced with the hive. A unique point of view is obscured in a mash up. A distinct voice is lost in the computational cloud.
As an example of Lanier's concerns, consider the following paragraph: "I know quite a few people, mostly young adults but not all, who are proud to say that they have accumulated thousands of friends on Facebook. Obviously, this statement can only be true if the idea of friendship is reduced. A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other. Each acquaintance is an alien, a well of unexplored difference in the experience of life that cannot be imagined or accessed in any way but through genuine interaction. The idea of friendship in database-filtered social networks is certainly reduced from that."Could it be that if we are ever going to be fully present in a given moment or to a given person, we are going to have to limit our connectivity?
Rob Merola ministers in Sterling Heights Virginia at St Matthew's Episcopal.
Read Chapter 2 of the book, You Are Not a Gadget via The NY Times.
Comments